Did he run away, get lost or was he abandoned? Sash Simpson, the former executive chef of Mark McEwan’s North 44 restaurant and owner of his own global-fusion fine-dining establishment Sash Restaurant and Wine Bar in Toronto, can’t remember much about his early life in Chennai, India. He doesn’t even remember his birthname or that of his parents and siblings.
At age five, in the mid-70s, he ate out of garbage cans and slept on the ground, until one day he was rescued by the orphanage Families for Children, founded by Canadian Sandra Simpson. After tugging on the skirt of the tall blonde white lady when she would come to visit the home, she eventually adopted him at age 8 and brought him back with her to Toronto.
The Simpsons – Sandra and husband Lloyd – have been the subject of many a news story over the decades, living those years in the city’s Forest Hill neighbourhood in a rented house with their growing nest of 32 kids – four naturally born, the rest adopted from all over the world. Sandra was invested a Member of the Order of Canada in 1984.
Sash’s rags-to-restaurateur story has also been told before, but now he’s the subject of a full-length documentary, Born Hungry, by award-winning writer/director Barry Avrich (Made You Look, Without Precedent, Oscar Peterson: Black + White, The Last Mogul), currently streaming on Crave.
The key to the documentary? The 54-year-old married father of two goes back to India to search for his birth family.
“Here’s this person with Indian roots that did not have the Indian culture growing up,” says Avrich, 61, who was connected to Simpson by co-executive producer Jay Hennick, a former client from North 44 who had told him for 15-plus years that his life is film worthy.
“I, as a documentarian, and a scientist in a lot of ways, was curious of human behaviour, of what it would be like to bring him back there, and see him react, and see him be immersed in that extraordinary, chaotic, yet beautiful environment,” he added. “And so, it was essential to me, as a filmmaker, to go watch him witness flashbacks in a market, in a train station, on buses and trains, and watch him disappear in the moment. That was always going to be the central part of the film.”
There are many hot topic elements to Born Hungry that should captivate the viewer beyond Sash’s attempt to track down his family. There’s genealogy and identity, which websites like 23 & Me and Ancestry have made accessible and affordable for everyone. There is also a foodie aspect, with Sash being a chef. The film is like Anthony Bourdain, The Bear, Who Do You Think You Are? and Finding Your Roots rolled into one.
“If anybody heard about my story, it was very much an abbreviated version of my how I came from A, B, C, D,” Sash says. “I remember telling Barry, ‘Make it real because it’s a real story. I don’t know how you’re going to put it together, but we’ll do what we need to do to make this movie happen.’ And he said, ‘I’ll tell you right now, Sash, we have to go to India.’ And I said, ‘Well, I got that for sure.’”
Sash says Avrich also told him, “’We need your mom in here. Your mom was a big part of you.’ I said, “Well, without my mom, I’m nothing; I don’t exist. So, yes, you’re right.’”
Born Hungry is dedicated to Sandra, an extraordinary woman who passed away last year but is featured in the film, and even gets to see Sash Restaurant and Wine Bar.
In India, interwoven between Sash’s visits to a lawyer and investigator to help locate his family – and the memory-triggering visits to the movie theatre in which he used to sleep, the cigarette factory he recalls his father worked at, and, ultimately, to the orphanage that gave him his second chance – Sash expands his culinary knowledge by visiting local markets.
He meets up with Michelin star Chef Thomas Zacharias, formerly of New York’s Le Bernardin and owner of The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai, who buys and cooks up a dish of goat brains right there on an open fire in the street. Later, Sash tours Crawford Market with Chef Shipra Khanna, winner of MasterChef India, where he learns of spices he’s never seen before. “The mission of going to India was finding myself through food,” Sash says in the doc.
“Going back to India was a shellshock as far as flavours,” he adds. “You go into your pantry and look at your spice rack and it goes from here to there in a couple seconds. In India, it’s just endless. And the food that I ate, everything was always different.”
Avrich, a foodie himself, notes that he always intended to pair Sash with other chefs in the film. “So much didn’t make it into the film. We shot with so many other chefs, and restaurants. Maybe there’s a part two, somewhere, just Sash and Indian cooking.”
Sash, who has not added goat brains to his menu – it tastes like scrambled eggs, by the way – has opened a restaurant at Families for Children in order for the kids who age-out of the orphanage at 18 to pick up a skill and avoid ending up on the street.
With his mom’s passing, Sash is also hoping to carry on her legacy, which includes finding a way to have doctors in residence and volunteering at the orphanage. “So, if something goes wrong, there’s a doctor in the house, [as] opposed to them coming in. When you have that many kids in that orphanage, kids are going to get sick. They’re going to need to be serviced literally almost every day and somebody needs to be there … I have a hunger for taking care of that orphanage because I came out of it and I want to give something back.”
He adds: “I have a restaurant that I can call my own. I have no partners. And the fact of the matter is that this belongs to an Indian kid [who] came out of the streets of India, didn’t have a home, who could have basically died, but got lucky and got a miracle happen to him. And this is what happened on the flip side of it.”
Born Hungry is currently streaming on Crave.
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